Kindle will replace textbooks at school

What an interesting idea: Clearwater High School will ditch textbooks for Kindles. Next year, all 2,100 students will get an e-reader loaded with their textbooks. The school is still negotiating, but it looks like it may end up with a deal with Amazon's Kindle.

I have a Kindle, so I'm familiar enough with it to foresee how kids can take advantage of features like bookmarking pages and highlighting paragraphs and taking notes. It makes it even easier to find those notes because they are a separate file. I would imagine the student would be responsible for replacing a lost or stolen e-reader, just like they are now with textbooks, so we'll see how that turns out.Kindles retail for $259 each but you have to figure that the school will get a deal on buying so many. Of course this might be just a good way for Amazon to sell off some of these Kindles since a faster, thinner, sharper model is slated for launch in August.

Considering the back problems kids are getting from their weighty book bags, this could be a very good improvement. I just wonder if the school realizes that even with limited Internet access and an agreement not to surf inappropriate websites that kids might still be surfing the web while appearing to be reading a book.

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